Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [204]
He rushed to the stove, lifted the lid off the pot and went through the motions of stirring the stew, hatefully, paying no attention to his performance. He flung the wet spoon down on the stove, letting the grease drip into the gas burners, and came back to the table.
“Yeah, I’ll write my autobiography if anybody ever gives me a chance,” he said. “How can I concentrate on serious work when this is the sort of thing I have to do?” He jerked his head at the stove. “Friends, huh! Those people think that just because they took me in, they can exploit me like a Chinese coolie! Just because I had no other place to go. They have it easy, those good old friends of mine. He never lifts a finger around the house, just sits in his store all day; a lousy little two-bit stationery store—can it compare in importance with the book I’m writing? And she goes out shopping and asks me to watch her damn stew for her. She knows that a writer needs peace and concentration, but does she care about that? Do you know what she did today?” He leaned confidentially across the table, pointing at the dishes in the sink. “She went to the market and left all the breakfast dishes there and said she’d do them later. I know what she wanted. She expected me to do them. Well, I’ll fool her. I’ll leave them just where they are.”
“Would you allow me to ask you a few questions about the motor factory?”
“Don’t imagine that that motor factory was the only thing in my life. I’d held many important positions before. I was prominently connected, at various times, with enterprises manufacturing surgical appliances, paper containers, men’s hats and vacuum cleaners. Of course, that sort of stuff didn’t give me much scope. But the motor factory—that was my big chance. That was what I’d been waiting for.”
“How did you happen to acquire it?”
“It was meant for me. It was my dream come true. The factory was shut down—bankrupt. The heirs of Jed Starnes had run it into the ground pretty fast. I don’t know exactly what it was, but there had been something goofy going on up there, so the company went broke. The railroad people closed their branch line. Nobody wanted the place, nobody would bid on it. But there it was, this great factory, with all the equipment, all the machinery, all the things that had made millions for Jed Starnes. That was the kind of setup I wanted, the kind of opportunity I was entitled to. So I got a few friends together and we formed the Amalgamated Service Corporation and we scraped up a little money. But we didn’t have enough, we needed a loan to help us out and give us a start. It was a perfectly safe bet, we were young men embarking on great careers, full of eagerness and hope for the future. But do you think anybody gave us any encouragement? They did not. Not those greedy, entrenched vultures of privilege! How were we to succeed in life if nobody would give us a factory? We couldn’t compete against the little snots who inherit whole chains of factories, could we? Weren’t we entitled to the same break? Aw, don’t let me hear anything about justice! I worked like a dog, trying to get somebody to lend us the money. But that bastard Midas Mulligan put me through the wringer.”
She sat up straight. “Midas Mulligan?”
“Yeah—the banker who looked like a truck driver and acted it, too!”
“Did you know Midas Mulligan?”
“Did I know him? I’m the only man who ever beat him—not that it did me any good!”
At odd moments, with a sudden sense of uneasiness, she had wondered—as she wondered about the stories of deserted ships found floating at sea or of sourceless lights flashing in the sky—about the disappearance of Midas Mulligan. There was no reason why she felt that she had to solve these riddles, except that they were mysteries which had no business being mysteries: they could not be causeless,